'Finding Vivian Maier'

The quick hit

A thin documentary on the late Vivian Maier, a nanny whose previously unknown collection of street photographs earned her a posthumous reputation as an artist.

Grade: B-

An exciting electric current of discovery runs through “Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary about a street photographer who never exhibited her work. She scarcely shared it even with those who knew her. Then again, many of her acquaintances when she was taking some of her remarkable images, particularly in and around Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, were the children she cared for while working as a nanny.

Later in her life, some of those children took care of her, first by moving her into an apartment and then the nursing home where she died in 2009. What rotten timing: She was on the verge of being discovered, first as a curiosity and then as a social-media sensation and a mystery.

It’s no surprise that Maier is now the subject of a documentary, given the quality of her work, the nominal exoticism of her life and the secrets that still drift around her. She’s a terrific story – part Mary Poppins, part Weegee – who was at once emancipated and in service.

She was introduced to the world, as it were, by John Maloof, one of this movie’s directors, who bought a box of her negatives at a Chicago auction in 2007 for about $400. The auction house, he explains, told him the work was by Maier, but he found nothing about her on Google. He had purchased the negatives for a book he was working on, but after deciding that they were of no use, he stashed the box away.

And then he took it out again, scanned some images and put them up on Flickr. “I have a ton of her work (about 30,000 to 40,000 negatives), which ranges in dates from the 1950s-1970s,” he wrote there in October 2009. “Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? Or do bodies of work like this come up often? Any direction would be great.”

By the next month, the British newspaper The Independent had churned out an article on Maier with the waggish, heat-seeking, imprecise headline “Little Miss Big Shot: Fifties America Exposed – by a French Nanny.”

More news articles followed, and by January 2011, the Chicago Cultural Center had mounted an exhibition titled “Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer.”

The industrious Maloof, meanwhile, scanned more of her work, bought more of her negatives and started telling his tale and hers, or as much as he knew. Given that this is also a social-media story – Maloof discovered her, but the Internet made her a star – the Kickstarter campaign to bankroll this documentary was inevitable.

The film, which he directed with Charlie Siskel, is absorbing, touching and satisfyingly enjoyable because Maier was a fascinating, poignant and somewhat enigmatic woman. As the title suggests, the filmmakers take up Maloof’s search for his mystery woman (complete with an unnecessary shot of someone typing her name into Google), framing her as a riddle to be solved.

With Maloof playing emcee and sleuth, he and Siskel follow much the same arc that runs through the better news accounts about Maier. It’s a breezy, perhaps overly tidy narrative ornamented with her work and packed with interviews with some of her old charges and their parents. Some of the darker reminiscences are in sharp contrast to the movie’s upbeat tone and relentlessly jaunty music.

So, it’s a solid if finally thin introduction to Maier. It’s also, to state the obvious, a feature-length advertisement for Maloof’s commercial venture as the principal owner of her work; his name is on the stamp that authenticates the photographs. Vivian Maier is a find but she’s also now a business, and the documentary would be stronger if it had dug into the complexities of what it means when one person assumes ownership of another’s art.

There are times when Maloof – particularly when he’s defensively speaking about the work’s artistic merit – feels as if he were delivering a sales pitch. He and the movie are on better ground when they let the likes of Mary Ellen Mark testify to its quality.

The documentary nods in the direction of some rich issues, including who gets to sanctify work as art, and why. It’s a thread that has additional resonance, given that everyone’s a critic on the Internet, which is where Maier’s work was not just first publicly seen but also anointed.

There’s another undercurrent here about her status as an artist (partly because she didn’t formally study art) and even questions about photography’s status as an art (a hoary theme that emerges because she didn’t print her own work). Time and professional pronouncements will decide if she was an outsider artist or just an unorthodox one who, as a single 20th-century woman, found freedom, her voice and her own private bohemia while under cover of other people’s bourgeois domesticity.

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